Mike Richards shows how to turn a generic resume into a problem-solving tool. Replace vague duties with numbers: cost savings, retention rates, speed improvements. Then tailor each application to the company's specific pain points, positioning yourself as the solution they need.
Chapters
In this week's newsletter, I talked about CVs and resumes and I talked about how they are living documents, if you like. They're like websites where you need to constantly improve them. But most CVs or resumes, I see, how can I put it? They are boring. Yes, they are. Now do you know why? Let me show you. Let me come over here and let me show you. So this is what I normally see. CV resume arrives on my desk. I'm a flexible, motivated individual with great attention to detail and I often see detail. Yep, spelt wrong. Yeah, it's wrong, it's rubbish, it's boring. So what do you do instead? Oh, I thought you never asked. Here we go. Bit of Blue Peter for those of you in the uk. Tell people what you've achieved. Tell people how you've made a difference at your current company because then you can make a difference at their company. So maybe you led and retained a team of five. Your company was taken over, integrated into a new plc, you retained the staff, you kept everyone on board. Fantastic. Tell people your story. Come back to that. Another thing, skilled and foreign exchange cash management. How many times do I see that you're a Treasury professional. Well done. That's your job. That's a no. Get rid of it. What could you do instead, though? Mike, come on. That's what I do. I know. Reduce your bank fees. That's great. Save the company money. Reduce the liquidity profile across EMEA region. Save 2 billion over a five year period. Those sound interesting. Those sound like things that people want to hire you for. Who would have believed it? They want to actually have you, in part their team. Great idea. Now this one, I actually looked on someone's resume before this because I wanted. And this is exactly what they had. TMS implementations and I know about SWIFT and APIs. Again, well done for doing your job. No, what do you need to do differently? Let's have a look. Streamline the processes, use systems, reduce the processing time for two days, implement the system, brought it down to one hour per day, saved equivalent three time full time employees globally. So you are saving them time, money, paying for yourself. That's what you need to do. So how do you need to think about it? But Mike, how do I do this? Easy, let me show you. When a company is hiring, they have a problem or a series of problems and what you need to be. That's right. Is their paracetamol. You need to take away their headaches. Now I'll give you a practical example. Let's Talk about Jim. Jim, US based treasurer, while ago now, but I helped him with his job search. Jim had applied for a variety of roles. Over 100 positions, was getting nowhere fast. So we looked at it and number one, we found Jim was just spray and play, sending out his resume without tailoring it. So we started to tailor his resume and we found a couple of roles that he was brilliantly suitable for. One in particular, remember, they just taken over another company and on his resume it said nothing about some of his skills and some of his skills that were tailored to that role. So I sat down with Jim, I said, jim, why haven't they hired internally? What do you mean? Look at their company. Why haven't they hired? We could see from their team they didn't have anyone that was a natural successor to be the treasurer. I said, there you go, Jim. So you can go in there. You've actually trained people. So I've trained people across continents. I've done managed teams of 20, 25 people. Yeah. Where does it say that on your resume? Oh, okay. Put that at the top. Amazing. So they knew he would come in and he would coach the people. Another thing, foreign exchange. This was the first time they'd really had lots of international operations. They'd been mainly domestic focus in the us, Bought this other company and a couple of other companies actually in Europe and in Asia Pacific. Said, you've done that? He went, yeah, I've done it loads. I said, okay, should we put that in then, please. What happened from there? Tim got all the way through. He got to the final round interview. He didn't get the job, but I'm pleased to say, no, I'm not pleased he didn't get that job, but he got the next one. And all he did was he tailored his resume a little bit. And what he did was he focused on helping that client and he was there. Paracetamol? Yeah. Love it. Hope that helps. And thank you very much for enjoying the videos. All right, cheers.
